Aaron Spelling is back. Funny that he, of all people, would produce a new generation`s TV of choice.
Spelling, the man credited with calling TV ”cotton candy for the mind,” had been written off for dead only three years ago.
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His TV recipe-a fluffy mixture of glitz and schlock-was passe at a time when Steven Bochco and other producers were hitting the Baby Boomer target squarely with such self-consciously literate programs as ”L.A. Law.”
Spelling was at an age when he could retreat to his new, 56,500-square-foot megamansion in Holmby Hills to lick his wounds and reflect on easier times.
But Spelling was shrewder than his critics. After 18 months of stagnation, he skirted over to Rupert Murdoch`s burgeoning Fox network and bypassed the Baby Boom with ”Beverly Hills, 90210,” a show that teenagers gulped down like a banana Slurpee.
Spelling, now 69, had out-younged his competitors.
He`ll be all over the dial this autumn with formula dramas the critics are calling 90211, 90212, 90213 and 90214.
Fox`s ”Melrose Place,” about the lives of twentysomethings in a trendy Los Angeles neighborhood, is already on the air (8 p.m. Wednesdays, WFLD-Ch. 32).
”The Heights,” about the young, working-class members of a rock band, comes to Fox this fall.
Spelling`s contribution to NBC will be ”The Round Table,” chronicling the lives of twentysomethings in Washington.
CBS bought Spelling`s ”2000 Malibu Road,” about the beautiful and troubled inhabitants of a Malibu beachfront home, as a summer series with a presumed afterlife.
The apparent clones are quintessential Spelling. He finds something that works, then keeps punching the ticket into tatters. And at the moment,
”Beverly Hills, 90210” is TV`s hottest ticket.
Come fall, the critics will almost certainly curl their lips at Spelling`s new shows. So what else is new?
Spelling is a reedy man with stooped shoulders, somehow stretching 140 pounds onto a 5-feet-10 frame. He has a thatch of gray hair and dark, soulful eyes sunk behind boyishly long lashes.
Spelling is soft-spoken, invariably polite and almost always inscrutable. He grew up on the scruff side of the tracks in Dallas. His manner suggests an empathetic streak and an innate kindliness.
He`s so good with the small touches, pats on the back and flowers in dressing rooms, that those who`ve worked for him usually shower Spelling with earnest raves.
As bit actor in the 1950s, Spelling says, he ”played every kleptomaniac and dipsomaniac in the history of `Dragnet.` ” He turned to writing with
”The Zane Grey Theater” and later, in 1965, formed Aaron Spelling Productions.
His credits include 3,000 hours of TV shows, a figure ensconced in the Guinness Book of World Records, and only one Emmy, for the ABC nuke movie
”Day One.” He has, however, won six NAACP Image Awards, and can fairly be credited as a pioneer in putting sympathetic gay characters onto television.
A decade ago, Spelling was TV`s most powerful producer. His string of hits on ABC included ”Charlie`s Angels,” ”Hart to Hart,” ”The Love Boat,” ”Fantasy Island,” ”Hotel” ”T.J. Hooker,” ”Vega$” and the surpassingly glossy ”Dynasty.”
A Spelling production never taxed the mind, but neither did it burden the eye.
His shows were smeared across one-third of the ABC prime-time schedule, and critics were quick to dub the network the Aaron Broadcasting Co.
Then the roof began to sag. Spelling`s hits were succumbing to age. He couldn`t help doing his formula to death, while public tastes were changing.
Apparently sensing that Spelling was a drag on its image, ABC cut him loose from his exclusive contract.
Spelling shopped around. When he visited high-flying NBC, programming chief Brandon Tartikoff greeted him with a red carpet and brass band, and with an open ear for Spelling`s ideas.
The result was ”Nightingales,” premiering in 1988. Spelling pitched it to NBC as ”student nurses in Dallas in the summer and the air-conditioning doesn`t work.”
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The critics lacerated it as irredeemable T&A, and professional nurses went ballistic. An embarrassed Tartikoff pulled ”Nightingales” from the schedule in 1989.
Finally, Spelling`s career had bottomed out, and he seemed a ripe passenger for a slow boat to oblivion.
”We had a bad period,” Spelling said recently. ”I guess in our town, if you`re Hank Aaron you have to hit a home run every time you get up to bat. I couldn`t do it.
”Frankly, I don`t know what would have happened after `Nightingales` if
(former Fox Chairman) Barry Diller and Fox hadn`t called and said, `Would you like to do something about a high school show?` ”
Spelling casually admits that he has put worse things than
”Nightingales” on the air. A best-forgotten disaster called ”B.A.D. Cats,” for one, though it provided an early paycheck for Michelle Pfeiffer. And there was a little bomblet called ”San Pedro Beach Bums.”
”You fail,” Spelling said with a shrug. ”You try, you fail.”
But Spelling didn`t really have failure in mind when he made the press tour rounds over the last two weeks.
In his own way, he was running a victory lap in front of his natural enemies: the critics, who had buried him three years ago.
Not that Spelling would say it so plainly. It`s the happiest time of his life, he said, adding that he`d just run across a former colleague, producer Paul Junger Witt, who`d congratulated Spelling on his revived fortunes.
”Things like that,” Spelling said with a little smile, ”mean more to me than anything in the world.”